Tim Urban, who wrote one of my favoritest posts ever (“The Great Filter”), just shared a new article on creating offworld communities:

Let’s look at it another way. Let’s imagine the Earth is a hard drive, and each species on Earth, including our own, is a Microsoft Excel document on the hard drive filled with trillions of rows of data…

Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do?

Shortly after my “Made in Space” post, I discovered that a company called Made in Space exists. I followed them on Twitter last year as they installed a 3D printer on the International Space Station. Newsweek says:

Their first offering, launched to the ISS in the fall of 2014, is fairly simple: a 3-D printer that prints plastic parts. In itself, this will bring on a manufacturing revolution of sorts. “The first 3-D printers on the ISS will be able to build objects that could never be manufactured on Earth,” says Kemmer. “Imagine, for example, building a structure that couldn’t withstand its own weight.”

Made in Space’s next iteration will be able to print with multiple materials, including both plastics and metals, which means that sometime in the next five years, 60 percent of the parts in use on the ISS will be printable. And just behind this version is the real game changer: a 3-D printer capable of printing electronics.

…[Says Dunn,] “It’s hard to say for sure, but around 2025 we should be able to print electronics aboard the ISS. This means we’ll be able to email hardware into space for free, rather than paying to have it launched there.”

“I believe the pioneering efforts of early astronauts like Buzz [Aldrin] need to be taken to the next level. I am convinced that one day humans will have to colonize other planets in order to survive. Space travel will become an everyday necessity.”

It’s a story that potentially explains why Earth hasn’t yet been contacted by alien life. There might be a very difficult obstacle every intelligent life form eventually faces, an obstacle greater than all the ones before it, that almost no species surmounts. This obstacle permanently extinguishes (filters) almost all life forms. If the Great Filter exists, it’s an evolutionary challenge humans could face with extremely low probability of success.

There’s an excellent article discussing The Great Filter (and other responses to Fermi’s Paradox) on the blog Wait But Why. And the authors note that, if the Great Filter exists, we don’t know whether we’ve already encountered it or not. WBW writes:

Therefore, say Group 1 explanations, it must be that there are no super-advanced civilizations. And since the math suggests that there are thousands of them just in our own galaxy, something else must be going on.

This something else is called The Great Filter.

The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there’s a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There’s some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter.

For example, regardless of what one thinks of the possibility of anthropogenic climate change in the short term (the next 200 years), the fact is that Earth’s climate WILL change in the long term (in the next 200,000 years). Drastically. You could imagine how dramatic and geologically quick swings in climate could challenge a species. There are multiple phyla on earth whose species span extreme climates, like cyanobacteria and tardigrades.

How does this relate to moving off-world?

Finding ways to adapt to different living conditions is a useful step toward passing the Great Filter. Let’s diversify our real estate strategy. Hedge our bets.

An important initial step in securing an off-world future is starting and scaling manufacturing in space.

Several companies are already working on the problem of mining in space, to capture the rich deposits of gold and other metals embedded in asteroids. But most likely those metals will be brought back to Earth to be worked. We’ll still need to figure out how to process raw materials and build things without the benefit of gravity and, eventually, without bright starlight. Otherwise, any vessel we permanently eject from Earth, no matter how well provisioned, will ultimately break down and kill its inhabitants.

But how to get started? I think we start simply. Do something that draws attention and gets people thinking about doing business from space. Take a straightforward, known manufacturing process, and reproduce it in space.

Like T-shirts. Truck all the fabric, thread, tags, and equipment into orbit, assemble a batch of shirts there, and cart it back down. Label it “Made in Space” and charge hundreds of dollars for it.

Only problem is…we ain’t found no wormhole yet. And space is big. So big that just getting to our Sun’s nearest star, as fast as humans can make spacecraft go, would take 50,000 years. As Neil deGrasse Tyson so elegantly put it, “The distances of space are incommensurate with the longevity of our biological form.” This probably means we’ll need an interim strategy before colonizing a brand new star system.

Wormhole or no, it’d be nice to start working on an exit strategy before we’re staring extinction directly in the face.

We know the size of an asteroid that would do very bad things. It’s about a kilometer across, little more than half a mile across. That size asteroid would disrupt civilization. It wouldn’t leave us extinct, but it would disrupt the food chain, transportation channels, things that we rely on for modern living.

…And then at a ten-kilometer size, you’ve got about an extinction level asteroid.

…In the old days, we thought it would just leave a crater, and [you’d be affected only] if you were unlucky enough to be where the crater hit…but we learned that the stuff it thrusts into the atmosphere blocks the sun, cloaks the earth, knocks out the base of the food chain — because photosynthesis can’t unfold — and a wave of extinction percolates across the tree of life.